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The Fuel 3-D website has a blurb that says, "The world’s first handheld point-and-shoot, full color 3D scanner. Our planned list price is $1500 but by placing your advanced order now you pay only $1,250. Fire up your creativity!" We've thought about getting a 3-D scanner ever since we first messed with a 3-D printer, but we've thought more about something in the sub-$300 price range than in $1000+ territory. But that's just us. There is no doubt a healthy market for 3-D scanners to use in commercial applications where $1250 (or even $1500) is hardly worth noticing. Ah, well. Maybe we need to look at the The DAVID website which describes their device as an "Incredibly Low-Cost 3D Scanner for Everyone!"
Their 3-D starter kit is only $529 from a randomly-selected U.S. reseller, which isn't too bad compared to the alternatives. But waiting for prices in this market niche to come down is another possibility, and it's one a whole lot of individuals -- including us -- and smaller companies will probably choose. (Alternate Video Link)

Tim:
So Stuart, what
are we looking at here?

Stuart
Mead: So here we
are looking at your image that we’ve just taken, we’ve
got a 3D image of your face we took it just like a photograph. We use
cameras to take the image and so you see that the data and the size
_____00:46 off
and it is probably split at the end.

Tim:
You can’t
make my eyes the same shape, can you?

Stuart
Mead: We can get
some software to do that probably, but not here. Now this is sifting
around the data, you see, now you can look at the sides, so you can
see the data gets stretched because we can’t see around the
corners, so we’ve just taken out that stretched data.

Tim:
You’re
selling both the software and hardware?

Stuart
Mead: Yes, the
software comes with the hardware. You need both together to make it
work.

Tim:
How does this
differ from, for instance, other forms of 3D scanning? From Kinect
and other things?

Stuart
Mead: Yeah. So we
are a completely different technology with a completely different
application. So we are photometric and stereometric combined and we
focus on an image about this big and we use a very high resolution,
we end up with a very high resolution. Other systems that you are
talking about look at macro-environments which is not what we do.
And they don’t do what we do. So it’s a completely
different technology application.

Tim:
What are the uses
that you see for this?

Stuart
Mead: Well, it’s
being used at the moment from everything from medical to front end 3D
printing to gaming, animation, arts and crafts—all
sort of applications.

Tim:
Can you quantify
the resolution over here?

Stuart
Mead: So, what we
are we looking at here, you can probably see it, but I’ll show
it on the screen, so you can actually zoom in here, here’s the
mesh, so you can see the mesh we’ve reduced, we’ve got
three points per millimeter, so you can see we’ve reduced it to
a very, very clean mesh very neat. We’ve filled in all the
holes and we’ve told the algorithms that there are no holes
that fills in the nostrils directly into printing. So we can look at
that resolution in different angles, so you remember that we took
three images with three different flashes, so we can actually look at
the different ways that the lighting illuminates the face. If we go
to the actual geometry, you can see how the shadows cast on the face
give us the detail and this is how we end up with such a
high-resolution image by using photometry.

Tim:
I think I look a
lot better in alabaster.

Stuart
Mead: Yeah, well. I
don’t know. It looks a little bit like a death mask, doesn’t
it? I’ll bring it back to color here. And of course, if you
wanted a larger area, you take a number of photographs and you stitch
them together.

Tim:
What is the file
that you’re actually outputting, what’s the format, is it
an SDL file?

Stuart
Mead: Yes, we use
SDL, OBJ and PLY.

Tim:
What do medical
versus some other applications tend to use, do they like to use
_3:37__.

Stuart
Mead: Well, if they
want the texture file they will take an OBJ and if they want just the
underlying geometry, they will use an SDL file, because an SDL file
is great for going to 3D printing.

Tim:
How long this has
been in development?

Stuart
Mead: Well, the
company originally sold the product for a medical device for wound
care back three years ago, but this is the first—the
new cameras which will launch next week for using in a more consumer
environment.

Tim:
And for consumers
price is important.

Stuart
Mead: Sure.

Tim:
How much will this
cost?

Stuart
Mead: So, the U.S.
price is $1500 and there are some specials on today on the $1500.
That is the hardware and the software, so it’s a really, really
_____4:15
price.

Tim:
And you’re
not limited to faces of course, you can also do anything of the same
general size?

Stuart
Mead: Yes,
absolutely. We are doing faces here because it’s very
interesting to see what’s up with 3D faces, but you can see
here, I can show you images of – this is a book cover for
instance, we’ve got corks, this is an example of what you can
do with the corks, the bark of a tree, so it pretty much likes
anything that’s kind of rounded with lots of good texture,
color or geometry.

Tim:
And the
improvements here are huge in the last few years in scanning as well
as printing 3D?

Stuart
Mead: Correct.

Tim:
What’s the
next step?

Stuart
Mead: I think –
well, I think printing needs to get – 3D printing needs to get
quicker. And scanning I think needs to get a lower price and that’s
what we’ve hopefully done, I mean scanning has traditionally
been very expensive.

There's not too much mechanical advantage in combining scanning and printing into once device, and they're too complex/expensive to combine because the combination would be too expensive and force users into bad compromises. This is different from 2D scanners and printers, because they're commoditized, so (1) the combination is cheap, and (2) you don't really care about the differences between specific scanners (or printers) because they pretty much do the same thing. In the 3D world, the different scanners

Another, this time shameless plug: Antera 3D [miravex.com] using the same method as Fuel 3D.Instant 3D visualization (several images per second), resolution 5 times better than Fuel 3d, on the market for 4 years.

Also, calling their accuracy, by which they mean noise level on a perfectly flat surface, of 0,3 mm on a 35 cm (diagonal) field of view "extremely high resolution" is quite a stretch. High compared to other cheap scanners, possibly, but at least an order of magnitude worse than industrial scanners of similar format.

I think it is an interesting concept to combine photometric measurements with geometric stereo in a single handheld unit, trying to get the best of both worlds, so to speak. But it certainly feels like they are overselling it.

After having read some on their website, I get the sense that the primary novelty of Fuel3D is not the technology, but who they are marketing it towards. There are plenty of scanners, like the ones you mention, that have equal or better performance characteristics, but they pretty much always seem to be marketed towards either medical applications or manufacturing industries. Fuel3D, on the other hand, have the slogan "Fire up your creativity", visit Maker Faire, and so on. I imagine they hope to break into

OK. I know nothing about 3D scanners but the subject of TFA and the others mentioned here all seem to be just stereo image capture. These might be useful for something but certainly not for duplicating the object in a 3D printer.To me, real 3D captures an object from all sides... a 360 degree sphere. These 3D cameras just capture one side view and try to calculate depth of that side from stereopsis.So... beyond making slides for my View-Master, what good it this?http://www.fisher-price.com/en... [fisher-price.com]

They use stereopsis for coarse scale depth and photometric stereo [wikipedia.org] (three directions from the looks of it) for finer scale structures. And they seem to be using some tracking target to compensate for motion between these captures. Not a bad idea per se, but I don't think their numbers are particularly remarkable.

I'm not aware of any 3D capturing technique that captures an object "from all sides", unless it's comprised of multiple individual scanners who's data you then stitch into a single model, or a moving

Begin-Stupid-RantI really hate it when a person writes about themselves in the first person plural. For some reason, it just irritates me. How many of you [the poster] are there? If only one, please write like it. It feels like you rubbed my fur the wrong way when you wrote that.End-Stupid-Rant

I'm an Industrial Designer and Manufacturing Engineer with a 3D printing startup. I've used just about every 3D scanner on the market right now at various points in my career (I'm also a beta developer for the Kinect for Windows V2); including the Creaform, Artec, and Vorum.

There are two key differentiators here I need to point out for y'all:

1) Scanning speed, and ability to sweep: this is a pro and con about the Fuel. Unlike other scanners like those I just mentioned, it cannot do a sweeping scan, your s